The spotted bat is a rare, thinly-recorded animal in Colorado by the number of open records. Only 22 occurrence records exist for it statewide, 4 of them iNaturalist observations, which makes it one of the least-documented mammals on the whole list.
A cliff bat of the western canyons
The spotted bat is unmistakable and almost mythically hard to find: jet-black fur marked with three white patches, and enormous translucent pink ears longer than its head. In Colorado it belongs to the Colorado Plateau canyon country of the far west, around the Colorado National Monument, the McInnis Canyons, and the Grand Mesa near Grand Junction, reaching south into the canyon rims of Montezuma County. It roosts alone in tall, inaccessible cliff cracks and forages high over the canyons for moths.
Heard before it is seen
Its echolocation calls are pitched low enough for people to hear, an audible clicking over the canyons on summer nights that is often the only trace of it. That trait aside, its scarcity in the record is real: it roosts singly in cliffs no surveyor can reach, and it turns up a few records at a time rather than in colonies.
Why summer only, and why so few
The record drops to nothing outside the warm months because the bat migrates or goes dormant once its moth prey thins and the nights turn cold, and the state lies near the chilly edge of its range. Even in season it is scattered and few, and NatureServe ranks it imperiled in Colorado, the most at-risk animal among the state’s canyon bats.
Full species profile
